The journey east was an exhausting, soul-wearying march through a landscape that grew increasingly hostile with every league they traveled. The familiar, sheltering embrace of the pine forest gradually thinned, the trees becoming stunted and twisted before giving way entirely to a vast expanse of brittle, sun-bleached rock and shifting dunes. The air itself changed, transforming from the damp, earthy scent of the woods to a dry, parched thing, heavy with the smell of dust, ancient stone, and a profound, unsettling silence. It was a place forgotten by time, a canvas of emptiness under the relentless, hammering sun.
Akero felt the shift not just in the environment, but within himself. A strange, persistent pulsing had begun in his core, a subtle vibration in the wellspring of his power that was both alien and eerily familiar. It was a faint, magnetic pull, a silent calligraphy written on his soul, drawing him inexorably forward.
"Do you feel that?" he asked quietly, his voice raspy from the dry air. He glanced at Nea and Kael, who trudged beside him, their faces set in masks of grim determination against the harsh conditions.
Nea nodded, her usual vibrancy muted by the oppressive atmosphere. Her eyes scanned the barren horizon, not with curiosity, but with a deep, intuitive wariness. "It feels... empty," she whispered, as if speaking too loudly might disturb the slumber of the land itself. "Not just quiet. A void. As if life didn't just leave here, but was scoured away long ago."
Kael offered no such poetic observation. His practical soldier's mind was focused on endurance and threat assessment. He accepted the sensation with a grunt, his gaze constantly sweeping the treacherous, rocky outcrops and towering dunes for any sign of ambush. "Just keep walking," he said curtly, adjusting the strap of his pack. "Don't dwell on it. It'll be where it needs to be." His words were a command to himself as much as to them.
For two more days, they pressed on, their world reduced to the blistering heat of the day, the biting cold of the night, and the endless, monotonous sea of sand. Finally, after a grueling climb to the crest of a particularly massive dune—a sandy giant that seemed to guard the edge of the world—they saw it.
Below them, stretching to the horizon, was an ocean of golden sand. And in its very heart, like the colossal skeleton of some long-dead leviathan washed upon a forgotten shore, lay the ruins.
They were immense, even in their utter devastation. Structures of a strange, dark stone, now cracked and shaken by millennia of wind and sun, bore the faint, ghostly outlines of what might once have been arches, towers, and vast halls. The desert was reclaiming its own; great sweeping dunes had crashed against the walls, swallowing entire buildings, leaving only the skeletal fingertips of the highest towers and the broken ribs of archways to protrude from the golden waves. They reached for a sky that offered no mercy, like the grasping fingers of the dead.
"Are those..." Nea began, her voice full of a strange mix of awe and dread, unable to finish the thought.
"Ruins," Akero confirmed, his own voice hushed with a potent combination of respect and strahopoštovanje. The pulse in his chest beat stronger here, a dull drum echoing the city's silent decay. "Are these the ones... that Carlos spoke of?"
Kael didn't answer immediately. He dropped to one knee, his eyes narrowed to slits as he meticulously scanned the approach, the crumbling walls, the silent windows like empty eye sockets. "They must be," he said finally, his tone grim. "There's no other place that fits the description. 'Under the sand'." He gestured with a jerk of his chin towards the slopes of their dune, where the sand was already pouring in relentless streams into their worn boots. "Literally."
The descent was treacherous, each step sinking into the unstable slope, the sand sliding back to erase their progress almost as soon as it was made. Reaching the base felt like arriving at the gates of a tomb. The absolute silence was a physical weight, heavy and suffocating. The only sound was the mournful, endless sigh of the wind as it whistled through fractures in the stone, playing a hollow dirge for all that had been lost.
The search that followed was slow, methodical, and disheartening. They moved through corpse-like buildings, their interiors choked with sand that had seeped into every crevice. They sifted through rooms where the remnants of a vanished life lay buried—a child's clay toy, half-melted by time; the rusted frame of a bed; fragments of pottery bearing faded patterns. Everything crumbled at the touch, returning to the dust from which it came. The sheer weight of ages pressed down on them, a tangible history of utter annihilation.
Hope was beginning to wither when Nea's voice, sharp with excitement, cut through the gloom from a chamber that had been partially shielded by a collapsed roof. "Here's something!"
They found her kneeling before a heavy, iron-bound chest made of a strangely dark wood. It was scarred and battered, but remarkably intact, preserved by the supremely dry air. A large, archaic lock held it fast.
"Stand back," Kael grunted. He didn't waste time with finesse. With a single, powerful swing of his sword, he shattered the lock. The sound of breaking metal was shockingly loud in the silent necropolis.
The lid opened with a long, agonized creak that spoke of centuries of disuse.
Inside, protected from the elements, lay a treasure not of gold, but of knowledge. A pile of parchments, scrolls, and a few leather-bound journals, all yellowed and brittle with extreme age, their edges flaking away. A history entombed.
With reverent, careful hands, afraid the pages would disintegrate at their touch, they lifted the first documents. Nea carefully unrolled the topmost parchment, its script elegant but faded. Her voice, when she began to read, was low and tremulous, a fragile sound breaking the ancient silence.
"'The battle between the Society of Light and the Unknown was one of the bloodiest in our history,'" she read, the words echoing softly in the dead air. "'Both sides suffered terrible, unimaginable losses. The Five of the Society fought with valor and unity, yet neither side could easily overcome the other, for the Unknown's power was a bottomless well of shadow. Although the Society of Light ultimately endured and claimed victory, it was by the thinnest of threads. It was a pyrrhic triumph that left us broken.'"
Akero felt a cold chill that had nothing to do with the desert night. He picked up another document, this one a journal entry. As his fingers traced the frantic, ink-blotted script, the pulsing in his source flared, not with pain, but with a resonant energy, as if the very words on the page were vibrating with a power the author had long ago imbued them with. He read aloud, his voice gaining strength, filling the chamber.
"'The conflict was more than just a fight. It was a battle of ideals, of the very fate of the world. The Unknown was an enigma—a force of nature given will. Powerful beyond measure, utterly unpredictable, leaving behind only a trail of destruction and secrets so deep we feared to look into them. We did not understand what we fought, only that it had to be stopped.'"
His heart tightened into a hard knot. He could feel it now, the echoes of the desperation, the terror, the world-shattering power that had clashed here. It was embedded in the very stones, a permanent scar on the fabric of this place.
Kael, who had been listening in silence while leaning heavily against a doorframe, let out a long, weary sigh. The historical weight seemed to bow his shoulders further. "Imagine it," he murmured, his voice uncharacteristically soft. "The Five... and whatever the Unknown was. The sheer scale of it. The sacrifice... And this is just a fraction of the story. How much more don't we know?"
"Do you think it's possible," Nea asked quietly, her eyes wide with a dawning, terrifying thought as she looked up from the scrolls, "that the Unknown isn't just... an enemy? A simple monster? That there's more to the whole story than just light versus dark?"
Akero was silent for a long time, his gaze lost in the intricate cracks running through the wall, as if reading a map of the past. "I don't know," he said finally, the words heavy with implication. "But I feel that we are not here by chance. This knowledge was hidden, but not lost. It waited. If there is something hidden here, something that can affect not just us, but the entire world... we must be more careful than we have ever been."
The trio lapsed into a deep, contemplative silence, each lost in the magnitude of what they had uncovered. The shadows in the chamber grew longer as the sun dipped below the horizon, mingling with the emerging starlight to create a tapestry of light and darkness. Each parchment they carefully laid aside opened up a deeper well of questions and uncertainty, pulling them further into a mystery that was far greater than they had ever imagined.
And then, a figure appeared.
It stood at the entrance to the chamber, silhouetted against the deep indigo of the twilight sky. Its form was slender, almost waif-like, and seemed to blend with the shifting shadows, making its details indistinct and blurred. It had not made a sound; its arrival was announced only by a sudden, piercing drop in temperature and the primal prickle of alarm on the napes of their necks.
All three turned as one, instincts screaming. Kael was instantly on his feet, his sword rasping as it cleared its scabbard, his body angled protectively. Nea gasped, gathering the precious scrolls and clutching them tightly to her chest as if to protect them. Akero's hand shot up, not in attack, but in readiness; the air around him thickened and hummed as he pulled on the flow of time, preparing to stretch a second into an hour if needed.
The figure did not advance. It simply stood there, a silent sentinel in the doorway, observing them. An aura of immense, ancient power radiated from it, cold and enigmatic. It filled the chamber not with a threat of immediate violence, but with a dense, ominous silence that was far more terrifying. The past had spoken through parchment. Now, it seemed, it had come to witness them in person.